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The neoliberal dream was basically the economic version of what utopian-minded tech prophets call the singularity: the coming near-mystical convergence of forces.

Future historians will be hard-pressed to know what to make of the giddy reveries of the 1990s. It was not merely the age when sage interpreters of the world system declared the end of history, ideology and other assorted curdled leavings of the modern age; it was also the moment when the global economic order was supposed to be reaching its own great moment of singularity under the placid technocratic rubric of “neoliberalism.”

The neoliberal dream was basically the economic version of what utopian-minded tech prophets call the singularity: the coming near-mystical convergence of forces that would sort out the channels of information and production and knowledge work into a seamless, world-conquering whole.

As social paradigms go, that is plenty ambitious. But as Marxist theorist David Harvey notes, the neoliberal market consensus was also devised to shore up the far more brutish goal of restoring “power to economic elites”–a project that ultimately entails punitive top-down measures that tend to give the lie to the “liberal” side of this market-utopian formulation. Neoliberal societies are marked, he writes, by “a strong preference for government by executive order and by judicial decision rather than by democratic … decision-making.”

When we see the squeeze put on the institutions that shore up neoliberal economies, the results can look like a parody of the sort of popular sovereignty that defines plain-old liberal polities. Witness the disastrous agon that Washington conducted this past summer over the elevation of the debt ceiling: The leaders of our most popular branch of government, the House of Representatives, spun well beyond reach of anything like sane deliberation, hewing instead to a brand of market fundamentalism so extreme that it sent the markets themselves shuddering, once Standard and Poor’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating to AA+.

The S&P report on the downgrade insisted on the need to contain the country’s debt by raising taxes–a measure that the report’s authors rightly divined was a third rail in the present American neoliberal consensus. This point, of course, received virtually no serious attention from the major-domos of economic policy.

Meanwhile, in the eurozone–the sprawling economic bloc lovingly fashioned by the free-trade planners of continental neoliberalism–the specter of unstable debt produced a series of legitimation crises. Greek citizens rose up to protest government cuts that shred the social safety net to bolster the bottom lines of global banks. As the conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy likewise faced an austerity reckoning, the Italian prime minister-cum-media-mogul did the unthinkable and actually approved an increase in capital gains taxes, while enacting a tax surcharge on the nation’s high-income earners.

In England, meanwhile, working-class youth rioted, which led to draconian police crackdowns after the fact–since neoliberalism also thrives on punitive social control aimed at the lower orders. Because the English uprisings were far more generalized than the unrest on the continent, they betokened something profoundly unsettling to the traditional guardians of neoliberal verities. As Nouriel Roubini, the market savant who divined the onset of the global mortgage meltdown, noted in an eye-opening commentary, the summer’s popular uprisings “are all driven by the same issues and tensions: growing inequality, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness. Even the world’s middle classes are feeling the squeeze of falling incomes and opportunities.”

Roubini stopped short of calling for the workers of the world to throw off their chains–but just barely. He raised an urgent cry for tighter regulation of “a financial system run amok” and even raised the specter of true neoliberal blasphemy: “more progressive taxation.”

When market-seers such as Roubini sound faintly like the reincarnation of Joe Hill, it seems a cause for real hope. But neoliberalism is adept at depoliticizing public discussion of economic policy. So his cri de coeur is likely to meet the same fate that has greeted neoliberalism’s critics on the left for the past three decades: deafening public silence.

History repeats. There are parallels between the end of the 18th century and today. The rich aristocracy owned most of the wealth. In France, they avoided taxes and spent most of their time at court, posing and gambling. There was a growing liberal movement - in Fance Voltaire and the Enlightenment, in Britain Adam Smith, Hobbes etc.
Today, we have neo-liberalism - an excuse for greed by the few. The banks have been taken over by the so-called investment bankers (risk takers - gamblers), who take big rewards and pass on their losses to the tax payers. In the USA, they pay minimal taxes through various evasions.
In France revolution broke out in 1789 The Bastille was stormed. New York's rulers are imprisoning the "Occupy Walls Street protestors". When will their goals be stormed?Posted by Michael Boomer on 2011-10-15 07:01:52

The neoliberal dream was basically the cheaper version of the utopian-minded prophets technology called the singularity: the arrival almost hosting murahmystical convergence of forces that work to sort the channels of information and knowledge production and in a perfect, winning the world whole.Posted by ade adwitya on 2011-09-29 22:00:47